Cron says "bad command"

[Geoffrey Leach]

In /etc/crontab, I have this line:
30  *  *  *  *  /home/root/fix_mail

root at mtranch[221]->ls -l /home/root/fix_mail
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1324 2010-02-18 07:04 /home/root/fix_mail*

Crond sees this and says (from /var/log/cron)
Feb 18 07:06:01 mtranch crond[1362]: (CRON) bad command (/etc/crontab)

/home/root/fix_mail is a perl script,
root at mtranch[222]->head -1 /home/root/fix_mail
#!/usr/bin/perl

And executes correctly when run from the command line.

Any thoughts on what the source of the complaint might be?

Thanks.